Grade high school students ’ methods of obtaining information on internet technologies and their attitudes towards the internet

The present study aims to find out the Internet use status of high school senior students and their attitudes towards the Internet and how their demographic characteristics affect these statuses and attitudes. To this end, a three-part scale developed by Luan, Fung, Nawawi and Hong (2005) was used. This scale was applied to 544 senior high school students studying in Diyarbakır city center high schools. The analysis of the obtained data indicate that students who are more experienced in Internet use have more positive attitudes towards the Internet. Both female and male students reported using the Internet at “Seldom” level and their Internet attitudes did not indicate a significant gender-based difference.


Introduction
The information technologies are used in schools to record information about students and ensure that they progress at their own learning speeds in achieving the learning outcomes.Paralleling the rapid advancement of the communication technology, the computer technology has helped increase the quality of education as well.Those institutions that are still teaching by sticking to their strict traditional ways keep producing arguments against the benefits of this new technology.As is the case with all machines that assist us by facilitating our lives, computers and the Internet may have some defects as well.Nevertheless, the potential of computers in improving learning cannot be disregarded (Moddux, Johnson and Willis 1997).The best course of action here perhaps is not to underscore their defects but to make the best of them by bringing their benefits to the fore.All the computers are just tools and anyone may abuse them because they may dislike them.What counts here is the approach and motivation towards these tools at schools (Provenzo, Brett & Mc Closkey 1999).Unless computer technologies are used appropriately, the desired organizational success cannot be achieved by using them (Dawis, Bogazzi & Varsova 1989).In ensuring success at using computers, student and school attitudes towards computers are also important factors (Yalman, M., & Tunga, 2014;Yalman, M., Gonen & Basaran, 2013).

Internet / Web attitude
People need to understand that computer and the Internet are crucial for information technology.Many studies on the subject have been conducted to prove this.These studies show that the subject of information technologies is now the most widely published issue.With the help of the information technology used in these studies, gaining insights into the attitudes towards computer and the Internet is aimed.Individuals' confidence and skill in computer use was used to learn about their attitudes towards computers.Similarly, a person's approach to computers and the Internet is parallel to his/her attitude towards them.A person can easily make up for his/her lack of knowledge or skill in this subject.No matter how much theoretical knowledge he/she may have, he/she needs to consolidate it by practice.
Generally, the popularization of computer and the Internet began with the adoption of technology in education.The learners' positive attitudes towards computers led to their easy and nonproblematic use of the Internet later.In the early days of computers and the Internet, their being expensive caused them to be more accessible as learning tools by families with higher socio-economic status.The use of computer and the Internet in educational organizations for teaching purposes resulted in lowering students' age for getting introduced to computer and the Internet.Thus, it was aimed to make students see the computer not only as a tool but as a component to assist their learning at a certain age and level.
Recognition of the ease and usefulness of computer and the Internet by the people using them has led to the rapid advancement of the technology (Tsai, 2006).

Limitations
This study is limited with the 544 randomly-selected students studying in 11 high schools (where the researchers were officially permitted to conduct their study by the National Education Department) in Diyarbakır city center during the 2010-2011 academic year fall semester.
This study aims to determine senior high school students' information obtaining behaviors about the Internet and their attitudes towards the Internet, and how their demographic characteristics affect these behaviors and attitudes.The study seeks to answer whether there is a statistically significant difference between students' attitudes towards the Internet by gender, by study area and by Internet using experience, and also from where they obtain their information about the subject of the Internet.

Method
By using the survey method, this study aims to find out the Internet use status and Internet attitudes of senior high school students studying in various high schools in Diyarbakır city center, and how their demographics affect their their status and attitude.As the data collection tool, a questionnaire was administered to 590 senior high school students in 11 classrooms.Of these 590 questionnaires (due to the elimination of the incomplete or erroneous forms) only 544 questionnaires were included in the analysis.

Data Collection Tools
In this study, a 3-part questionnaire form developed by Luan, Fung, Nawawi and Hong (2005) was used to determine students' attitudes towards the Internet.Originally developed for pre-service teachers, this form was translated into Turkish and tailored for senior high school students by the field specialists.Expert opinion was elicited on the validity of this adapted questionnaire form.The first part of the questionnaire form consists of the demographic information of the participants and their level of knowledge about the Internet, the second part includes the information about their Internet use durations and their purposes for using the Internet, and the third part includes items about their attitudes towards the Internet.For the second part of the scale, the Cronbach Alfa reliability coefficient was found to be 0,806, and for the third part it was found to be 0.707.

Data Analysis
SPSS 15.0 package program was used in the analysis of the questionnaire data.The significance level for the statistics was set to p<.05.For the "Internet Use Frequency" section in the original form of the data collection tool, Very often (More than 3 hours daily) "5", Often (Between 1 and 3 hours daily) "4", Sometimes (Between 15 minutes and 1 hour daily) "3", Seldom (An average of 15 minutes daily) "2", Never "1" scale points were used.For the "Attitude Towards the Internet" section, the questionnaire was scaled as, "Absolutely disagree "1", "Disagree "2", "Not sure "3", "Agree "4", and "Absolutely agree "5".When the arithmetic means of the attitude scores were analyzed, the means within the range of 1.00-1.80were accepted as "Absolutely disagree", 1.81-2.60 were accepted as "Disagree", 2.61-3.40 were accepted as "Not sure", 3.41-4.20 were accepted as "Agree", and 4.21-5.00were accepted as "Absolutely agree".Since the section titled "Computer and Internet Use Frequencies" was 5-point Likert type, in the interpretation of the arithmetic means of the frequency of use, the means between 1.00 and 1.80 were accepted as "Never", the means between 1.81 and 2.60 were accepted as "Seldom (15 minutes a day)", 2.61-3.40 were accepted as "Sometimes (An average of 15 minutes-1 hour daily)", 3.41-4.20 were accepted as "Often (An average of 1-3 hours daily)", and 4.21-5.00were accepted as "Very often (More than three hours a day)".These intervals were obtained by dividing the range (between the lowest point of 1 and the highest point of 5) by the number of levels.

Findings
The data obtained from the questionnaire applied to the senior high school students are presented as tables.In order to determine the students' Internet use and their Internet attitude levels and to ascertain the current status of the issue, the analysis was conducted by an assessment of the arithmetic means, standard deviation values, t and ANOVA tests, and on the basis of exactly where each item mean falls on the measurement scale vis-à-vis the total score.The distribution of the participating students' gender and their fields of study is shown in Table 1.Of the senior high school students participating in the study, 304 are male (55,88%) and 240 are female (45,12%).56,80% of them study Turkish-Mathematics and 43,20% study Mathematics-Science.According to the data in Table 2, of the senior high school students participating in the study, 38,42% reported having Internet connection at home, while 61,58% reported not having Internet connection.The responses given for the questionnaire item "Do you have Internet experience?" indicate that 80,70 % of the students have experience in using the Internet whereas 19,30% do not.Of the students who responded to the question "For how many years have you been an Internet user?", 13,97% reported not using the Internet, 14,43% reported using it for one year, 16,73% between one and two years, 17,10% between two and three years, 11,76% between three and four years, and 26,10% reported using it for five years or longer.

Table 5. Frequency and percentage distributions of the sources from which students obtain their information about the Internet
Where did you get your information about the Internet?f % From the books about the subject 11 2,02 From the books about the subject and from the courses offered by computer companies 5 0,92 From the books about the subject and from the courses at educational institutions 13 2,39 From the books about the subject and by self-teaching 12 2,21 From the books about the subject and from experienced people 1 0,18 From the courses offered by computer companies 18 3,31 From the courses offered by computer companies and from the courses at educational institutions 6 1,10 From the courses offered by computer companies and from experienced people 1 0,18 From the courses at educational institutions 37 6,80 From From the books about the subject, from the courses offered by computer companies and from the courses at educational institutions 4 0,74 From the books about the subject, from the courses offered by computer companies, from the courses at educational institutions, by selfteaching and from experienced people 1 0,18 From the books about the subject, from the courses at educational institutions and by self-teaching 4 0,74 From the books about the subject, by self-teaching and from experienced people 2 0,37 From the courses offered by computer companies, from the courses at educational institutions and by selfteaching 7 1,29 Total 544 100 The students' responses to the question regarding where they obtained their information on the Internet from indicate that 7,35% both from the classes at school and by self-teaching, 65,63% by selfteaching.These results show that there is no significant difference between students' Internet attitude mean scores by gender (t(540)= -0,55; p>.05).These results reveal that there is no significant difference between students' Internet attitude mean scores by their field of study (t(542)= 0,95; p>.05).The statistical analysis of these means indicate that there is no significant difference between students' attitude mean scores regarding their home Internet connection (t(381)= 1,098; p>.05).Furthermore, whether there is any statistical difference among the student groups based on their duration of Internet use was also analyzed and the results are presented in Table 9.The statistical analysis conducted by comparing the means of duration of time spent by students on the Internet indicates that students' attitude mean scores do not significantly differ in terms of their experience in Internet use (F(538)= 1,244; p>.05).

Discussion and Conclusion
In this section, the findings obtained from the study data are discussed.Recently, the increasing popularization of the educational use of Internet has completely changed students' views on it, who are studying at various levels of education.The present study shows that senior high school students do not use the Internet for its intended purposes, which may be caused by the inadequacy of the computer labs or PCs at schools, insubstantial subject knowledge of teachers, and the senior high school Internet-users' insufficient knowledge of the subject.Students' use of computer and Internet technologies as supplementary materials for their own learning may be directly related to the education they are given.Therefore, it might be more appropriate for students to be properly guided in how and for which purposes they can use computers and the Internet.Most of the participants think that they can rapidly access information on the Internet, which shows that these students will have better luck than today's adults about their use of the Internet.
When the finding that female students have lower rates of Internet use than their male peers is analyzed, boys' Internet use attitudes appear to be more positive than the girls.However, this difference was found to be statistically insignificant (Table 6).Similarly, the studies carried out with high school students (Kose and Gezer, 2006) and preservice teachers (Harmandar and Samancı, 2000;Çekbas et al., 2003) found no statistically significant correlations between gender and attitude towards Internet use.Similarly, male students were reported to exhibit more positive attitudes towards using the Internet than female students (Deniz, Gorgen, and Seker, 2006;Nai and Kirkup, 2007).This may have resulted from the fact that even though they may not have access to it at home, boys are able to use the Internet easily for various purposes at Internet cafes.
The data analysis shows that more than 60 percent of the students have been using the Internet for more than 3 years.This indicates that the age for starting to use the Internet is getting lower and lower and the use of the Internet is becoming increasingly common.In their study on university students' Internet competencies and attitudes, Wu and Tsai (2006) found that students' having more Internet using experience positively affects their Internet attitudes.However, the statistical analysis of the students' duration of Internet use in the present study did not find any significant difference between their attitude mean scores by Internet using experience.
Due to their parents' home Internet connection status, students' age at which they meet this technology and their conditions of using it may vary.The relevant research reports no significant difference in students' attitudes by their Internet use durations (Kahyaoglu and Çelik, 2011;Tertemiz-Isık and Çerçi, 2000).The findings from the current study indicate that students' attitudes by length of Internet use do not show any significant difference and thus support the findings obtained from other studies.
Students' methods of researching on and using the Internet may vary depending on their field of study as well.Although the students' attitude mean scores by their field of study are very close, according these scores, they were found to be at the level of "Not sure" for the Turkish-Mathematics field, and at the level of "Agree" for the field of Mathematics-Science (Table 7).However, no statistically significant difference was identified between students' attitude mean scores by their status of studying in either Turkish-Mathematics field or in the Mathematics-Science field.In their study on preservice classroom teachers, Usta et al. (2007) found that the high school subject areas they studied did not affect teachers' attitudes towards the Internet.
More than 50% of the students responding to the questionnaire reported using the Internet to play games, while 57% reported reading online newspapers "Never" or "Seldom".This finding is in line with the studies conducted by Altunoglu and Atav (2005) and by Agır, Sutçu and Sarı (2001), who found that students liken the Internet to an entertainment/information source.The questionnaire responses supported the finding that students do not use the Internet for online discussions and meetings (via online forum sites) that may help their education.Students think of the Internet as a good tool on which they can spend their free time or simply kill time (Vas and Gombor, 2009).
A deeper analysis of the findings shows that students are not adequately educated about the Internet and computer use and they try to be self-sufficient with the superficial information they have learned.Thus, the educational programs about the Internet and computers will help better educate the youth, our future.Increasing the education offered on the subject at schools and the guidance from field experts through their participation in such classes will be the most influential factor to change students' views on the issue.Allowing students to find resources that are suitable to their levels or getting instruction and guidance from specialists will ensure their introduction to the proper ways of using the Internet.
In the light of the obtained results and the discussion above, the following suggestions can be made to guide students towards the proper ways of using the computer and Internet: In order for the high school students to learn how to properly, ethically and effectively use the computer and Internet, and to raise an informed computer/Internet-literate youth, the "Information Technologies" course should be made a required course in high school curricula.
The courses regarding 'informatics ethics', which are currently taught as elective courses in only some faculties of education, may be made required courses for all the preservice teacher groups.Seminars and conferences on topics such as proper Internet use, Internet addiction and cyber-bullying targeting students, teachers and parents should be increased.
Considering the current rise in the use of the IT and the paralleling rise in the MEB (Turkish Ministry of National Education) projects, some further suggestions would include improving students' selfcontrol skills, informing parents about the safe use of Internet, developing hardware and software solutions to block inappropriate content, and inspiring stronger scientific interest in these educational IT processes as well.